alexture's reviews
948 reviews

Remain Silent by Robyn Gigl

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emotional fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Nice trans thriller for cis people. Sometimes (often) focused more on educating the reader than on the story, but the story was still good − although it had _many_ characters.
Rouge Karma by Jean-Christophe Grangé

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
Jean-Christophe Grangé, le Marc Lévy de l'atroce.

Je les lis tous, en levant bien les yeux au ciel, et en attendant le prochain. C'est terrible.
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Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James Gallagher

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informative inspiring fast-paced
An excellent introduction guide that was extremely useful to me.

Note that this isn't really a book, though: James compiled all his blog posts about technical writing into one document. Given this format, there are sometimes redundancies, regular occurrences of "see you tomorrow for another post!", and the structure is not always very clear. (Since it's published under a free license, I might just take the time to reorganise it a bit, some day, for a Second Edition. It would be a good exercise, too!)

A highly recommended read.
Sorry, Bro by Taleen Voskuni

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  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Bisexual romance!! 
Bisexual romance is special. There’s your good old straight romance, also known as romance with no adjective in front of it. There’s your gay and lesbian romance, sometimes including a painful coming out, with recent examples including Rana Joon and the One and Only Now and The lesbiana’s guide to Catholic school. But bisexual romance? How do you make a character bisexual in the first place if they’re only going to have one romance, huh? 
Easy − remind us that they’re bisexual. Remind us that they’re looking to date and don’t really care about the identity of who they’re dating. Make them break up with someone and make up with someone of another gender. Tell us. It’s fine, you know − showing bisexuality can be hard. Telling us « hey by the way, I’m dating you but I also like guys! » is great. And very well done in this novel, too − although there are painful outing and coming out stories because, well, it’s 2024 and queer novels still don’t allow their characters to just be happy. 
And speaking of painful coming out stories: this one is based on identity. Like in the two books I quoted above, our narrator, Nar, is a second-generation American. Her Armenian identity is incredibly important in the novel: after breaking up with her very very white boyfriend, Nar allows her mother and auntie to rope her into Armenian-Armenian dating life and commits to trying to find the perfect boyfriend (or girlfriend, she adds silently) at one of the cultural events. Except, of course, 90% of the cultural events are about the genocide, which doesn’t make for great date material. 
Nar’s first thought of « I’m so tired of everything being about the genocide » gets revisited several times throughout the novel, with our girl getting closer to her own culture and understanding that history doesn’t have to only be about grief. I love the way she reconciles with her heritage and starts feeling like a real part of « the community», and every single one of the sometimes complicated and painful steps that lead to that. 
Also, the book is actually really good − I’m not just impressed with the theme, the romance was really nice and the characters were lovable or hateable or, in some cases, very much both.
On Community by Casey Plett

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4.5

In this very long essay (or very short nonfiction book, depending on what framing you prefer), Casey Plett says she’s going to try to define community, then immediately makes it clear that it can’t be defined. 
Take the phrase “the [X] community.” When I read that phrase, I think: How does this person know this about the [X] community? What are the borders of the [X] community? How is the writer deciding who counts within them and who does not? Is the writer a member of the [X] community? Would others dispute their membership? Whatever claim is made about the community, how many sections within it must the claim apply to in order to justify the term? Perhaps most importantly, How can that writer possibly decide who gets to speak for the community? And who are those not speaking in their place?
 
And then, she tells us what it means to feel like you have a community, or none, or to be included or rejected of one community. She talks about « cancel culture », she talks about awkward trans picnics and of justice in the Mennonite community and of when you feel that you’re « from here » − a topic that I definitely relate to.
 
Communities welcome certain people and cast a suspicious eye on others. Communities lift up their valued members and ignore those they value a bit less. Sometimes those values are, shall we say, suspect. Communities can expel members when they choose, regardless of what that means for the member, and they stay communities no matter how heartless that expulsion might be.
 
tldr: communities are a vague concept with good and bad things in them.
 
…but I feel like it’s best to read the book, because that’s a pretty short tldr, huh?
Il n'y a que moi que ça choque ?: Huit ans dans la bulle des journalistes politiques by Rachid Laïreche

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Dans Il n'y a que moi que ça choque ?, Rachid Laïreche nous raconte ses huit années de journaliste politique chez Libération.

L'envoi à sa première conférence de presse un peu à l'arrache, parce qu'on n'a qu'un seul Arabe et qu'on ne va quand même pas le garder au service des sports comme un cliché. La découverte d'un écosystème où des médias d'opinions complètement opposées bossent ensemble pour se partager un scoop ou une interview. Les ministres invités à déjeuner, les petits coups en traître et le off.

Et puis, après un moment, l'incertitude. Rachid Laïreche commence à ne plus trop parvenir à communiquer avec sa famille : il est journaliste, les médias nous mentent. Et puis au-delà de nous mentir, on ne comprend rien à ce qu'ils racontent, ces politiques. Et puis de toute façon, Rachid, il a trahi, il ne s'occupe plus de nous, il ne parle plus de foot.

Une réflexion super intéressante sur le journalisme politique, certes, mais aussi sur la politique française elle-même, sur le journalisme dans son ensemble, et sur comment on revient sur Terre discuter avec les gens qu'on aime quand on ne s'exprime plus comme eux et qu'on a appris à ne plus les entendre.
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Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

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  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
Natural Beauty has stayed with me for a few weeks. I wasn’t going to write about it here, because I didn’t find it significant or likeable enough. And here I am a month later, still browsing through the list and feeling… something, when I scroll past the name of this book. 
I say « something » because I really don’t know what is going on here. Natural Beauty is such a short little horror novel, and yet it touches on so much. The body horror is engrossing (and also just gross), but it goes so much further than that − to the point that it feels like the least awful part of the book, in a sense. 
I found the book very similar to The Centre in a way, with its horror take on cultural appropriation. Others talk about this with more sensitivity and knowledge than myself, including the author herself. 
To me, the main topics were grief and body image. I could have chosen half a dozen more − pressure to perform, conformity, identity, being your parents’ caregiver, awful roommates, bisexuality − but these two stayed with me. The way grief makes you give up on what you love the most and pulls you down into this spiral. The way your body image makes you ignorant of what’s happening in your own mirror until it’s too late to understand that something else happened to your body. It’s good. It’s really good.
Station eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No
Une pandémie (non, pas celle-là) détruit presque l'humanité. Un homme meurt sur scène. Le reste du monde meurt deux semaines plus tard.
Des petits groupes de survivants tiennent bon, du mieux possible. Cet homme qui est mort un soir lors d'une représentation de Shakespeare a laissé d'autres personnes dans son sillage. Des ex-femmes, un enfant, une petite fille qui jouait un rôle mineur dans sa pièce, un paparazzi. Certains sont encore vivants, d'autres non.
Ils ne se connaissent pas, et pourtant, ils se retrouvent : dans une troupe de théâtre itinérante, une secte meurtrière, un aéroport devenu musée.
Un ouvrage frappant, aux personnages tiraillés entre le monde que nous connaissons et celui qui les attend. Brillant.
Debout, les damnés de l'Uber !: Chroniques by Charline Vanhoenacker

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 11%.
C'est pas que ça a mal vieilli, c'est plutôt que ça n'a pas vieilli. Je ne comprends pas très bien l'idée de sortir un bouquin sur des chroniques qui parlent d'une actualité quotidienne.
To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories by Sarah Viren

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Sarah Viren examines the nature of lies and conspiracies and how we build our Truth. 
When the author started writing this memoir, it was about her high school philosophy teacher in an European-inspired magnet programme where philosophy exists (i love this). In freshman year, it was an amazing class where the teacher encouraged everyone to think by themselves, some kind of Dead Poets Society type of genre-bending lessons. Two years later, when she had him again, this same teacher took these kids into a whole journey in absorbing conspiracy theories. 
Viren most memorably tells us about him peddling Holocaust denial to his students. She starts with her own recollection: the teacher playing a debate on whether the Holocaust actually happened, but only playing the first half of it, the denial part. Her shock and anger. Her friend, whose grandparents died in a concentration camp during World War II, trying to explain to her parents that they believed a lie, alienating herself from her family history for years. Her other friends, the one who don’t remember this story at all. And the few people who started remembering details she hadn’t − he said he didn’t have time for the second half, he had a fight with another teacher on this topic. Things she might have known, but didn’t remember. 
What begins as a study of a teacher and his lies becomes thoughts about how we build reality from our incomplete memories. How do you share memories to build a collective history that allows you to move forward? 
The second part of the memoir is another lie. As Viren is about to get her dream job in academia, with the sole caveat that her wife Marta needs to also find a job nearby, anonymous reports start accusing her Marta of sexually harassing students. They are taken seriously by the university, as they should; the couple is under investigation, the hiring is paused, Marta and Sarah have to contend with horrible accusations that they know are wrong… unless? 
It turns out that the job had two top candidates; the other person saw that Viren would get the job, and launched this smear campaign to have a chance. Academia is a cruel field. But during all that time, the women in this story deal with a « what if this was true? what if I can’t trust my partner? what if I can’t trust anyone? » kind of situation, which ties in very neatly to the conspiracy theories of that high school teacher. 
All these thoughts are linked, and all of them amount to how fragile and subjective the truth is. There aren’t many solutions throughout the book − I guess that’s a task for each of us. And maybe we can share our solutions and build new realities together.